Age-Related Effects on Future Mental Time Travel.

Filomena Anelli,Elisa Ciaramelli,Shahar Arzy,Francesca Frassinetti

doi:10.1155/2016/1867270

Filomena Anelli, Elisa Ciaramelli + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1155/2016/1867270

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Abstract

Mental time travel (MTT), the ability to travel mentally back and forward in time in order to reexperience past events and preexperience future events, is crucial in human cognition. As we move along life, MTT may be changed accordingly. However, the relation between re- and preexperiencing along the lifespan is still not clear. Here, young and older adults underwent a psychophysical paradigm assessing two different components of MTT: self-projection, which is the ability to project the self towards a past or a future location of the mental time line, and self-reference, which is the ability to determine whether events are located in the past or future in reference to that given self-location. Aged individuals performed worse in both self-projection to the future and self-reference to future events compared to young individuals. In addition, aging decreased older adults' preference for personal compared to nonpersonal events. These results demonstrate the impact of MTT and self-processing on subjective time processing in healthy aging. Changes in memory functions in aged people may therefore be related not only to memory per se, but also to the relations of memory and self.

Highlights

Healthy aging is associated with changes in autobiographical episodic memory, that is, the ability to recall one’s past experiences in their spatial and temporal context [1, 2]
While external details were comparable across groups, internal details were significantly fewer in older compared to younger adults, indicating that aging is associated with a loss in autobiographical memory specificity [3]
Duncan post hoc tests showed that young adults responded faster to personal than to nonpersonal events (1677 versus 1871 ms, resp., p < 0.05), whereas older adults showed comparable response times (RTs) for personal and nonpersonal events (2306 versus 2158 ms, resp., p = 0.10)

Summary

Introduction

Healthy aging is associated with changes in autobiographical episodic memory, that is, the ability to recall one’s past experiences in their spatial and temporal context [1, 2]. Levine and colleagues tested memory for past experiences in younger and older adults using the Autobiographical Interview (AI), which allows quantifying separately the episodic (internal) and semantic (external) details constituting participants’ autobiographical reports. While external details were comparable across groups, internal details were significantly fewer in older compared to younger adults, indicating that aging is associated with a loss in autobiographical memory specificity [3]. Addis and colleagues demonstrated that the loss in specificity characterizing older adults’ autobiographical memory spreads to their ability to imagine future events ([4]; see [5, 6]). Older (compared to young) adults produced fewer internal details and more external details for both past and future events, suggesting a similar effect of aging on remembering the past and imaging the future (e.g., [4, 7])

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Discussion

Conclusion